You might have heard of Tim Berners-Lee. The MIT professor is the researcher who invented the World Wide Web that we pretty much take for granted today. His greatest claim to fame aside, Berners-Lee is also one of the leading voices in the world for online privacy and government transparency. His work has been recognized and awarded many times and he has now received yet another award to add to his shelf. The Association for Computing Machinery has awarded him the $1 million Turing Award which is considered to be the most prestigious honor in computer science.
The Association for Computing Machinery A.M. Turning Award is often referred to as “the Nobel Prize of computing” so you can imagine that winning it is no small achievement. The award is accompanied by a $1 million prize that’s funded by Google.
ACM cited Berners-Lee in its announcement today for “inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the web to scale.” He has been given this honor on the 50th anniversary of the award.
“I’m humbled to receive the namesake award of a computing pioneer who showed that what a programmer could do with a computer is limited only by the programmer themselves,” said Berners-Lee, currently the 3COM Founders Professor of Engineering at MIT.
He added that it’s an honor to receive an award like the Turing which has previously been awarded to some of the most brilliant minds in the world. Berners-Lee is also the founder and director of the World Wide Web Consortium which sets technical standards for web development.
Filed in .. Source: news.mit.edu